Part 3

Meanwhile the ’Varsity was playing around the circle, and having hard luck. Not once, as yet, had there been occasion to call out the “snake dance” and “night-shirt parade” with which Sheddon victories were celebrated. Through all this, Larry seemed to be the only member of the student body who remained unmoved. Day after day he plugged along, religiously giving his afternoons when his team was called out; but that was all.

“Larry, you’re a fright――simply a fright!” Dick stormed, one evening when the news had come of another defeat for the “Blacksmiths.” “How you can go on, just as if nothing was happening, when――――”

“Might say nothing _is_ happening――to me,” put in the offish one grumpily.

“Of course it’s happening to you!” Dick yelped. “Aren’t you a part of Old Sheddon, I’d like to know? Haven’t you any heart at all?”

Larry jumped up and tramped across to the window which, in daylight, looked out upon Engineering Lab., and gave a cornerwise glimpse at the athletic field. When he turned back to face Dick his lip was shaking.

“It _does_ get me, Dick! I’ve fought it――fought it just as hard as I could. I know the fellows don’t like me, and a lot of ’em are calling me a ‘worm.’ Just the same, it’s breaking my heart to see Sheddon losing this way! I――――” and he turned to the window again, quickly, this time, as if to hide something that he was ashamed to let Dick see.

In a second Dick was beside him.

“Larry, you old sorehead――you don’t know how much good it does me to hear you s-say that!” he stammered. And then, in a steadier voice: “You’re all wrong about the fellows not liking you: _they’ll like you just as much as you’ll let them_. There isn’t a worth-while fellow in Old Sheddon that cares a hoot whether you’re rich or poor. If you’d only loosen up――――”

Larry did “loosen up” the next day when he was on the field with his team; and it was Oliver McKnight, son of any number of millions of Consolidated Steel, who applied the loosening twist. In an intermission, McKnight came and flung himself down beside Larry.

“Say, Donovan,” he began abruptly, “you ought to push my face in. Four or five weeks ago I said some things about you to Cal Rogers that gave you a good right to hate me straight through the four years. Of course, I didn’t know you were overhearing me; but that only makes it worse――looks as if I didn’t have the nerve to say such things to your face. I was a mucker; and ever since, I’ve been trying to dig up sand enough to come and tell you so.”

There was more than a drop of good, warm, Irish blood in Larry Donovan’s veins, as his name would indicate, and for an impulsive half-second he wanted to throw his arms around the pampered son of Consolidated Steel. He didn’t quite do that, but he did say what was fitting.

“That’s all right, Mac――perfectly all right. You just forget it. I won’t say that it didn’t rub me the wrong way at the time, but――――”

“Thanks, old scout,” McKnight broke in. “I’ve had that on my chest until I’m sore as a boil. What chance do you think we’re going to stand to lift the hoodoo to-morrow?”

The morrow was the day set for the “Blacksmiths” to play Rockford Poly on the home field. Rockford was not in the Conference, but it had a strong eleven, and even the best friends of the Sheddon team were saying that they hadn’t a chance in the world. But at McKnight’s question Larry scraped around and found a bit of the newly boosted college loyalty.

“We’ll never say die till we’re dead,” he asserted. “We’ve got to get in with both feet and put a barrel of pep behind our fellows to-morrow. We simply can’t _let_ them lose!”

“Gorry! it sure sounds good to hear you talk that way. But we’re lame, Donnie. Since Critchett and Johnson were laid out in that game with the down-State eleven, we’ve been sewed up. Brock’s put in all of his subs, first and last, and they’ve fizzled on him, one after another. Shebbie’s been keeping in wire touch with the team, and he says we’ll have to have new material here to-morrow for Brock to draw from.”

It was here that Larry showed that he could be generous.

“You’re the best all-round man on the Freshman, Mac, and here’s hoping for you,” he said; and he meant it.

“Not on your cabinet photo!” retorted the son of much money. “If it comes down to us, you’re It. You’ll be here on the field, won’t you?”

“Sure thing!” said Larry; though, up to that heart-mellowing moment when McKnight had made the _amende honorable_, it had been anything in the world but a sure thing.

Dickie Maxwell saw a new light in his room-mate’s eyes that night as they settled themselves on either side of the study table, but Dickie had a wise streak in him which came to the surface once in a while, and he forbore to say anything. But, just before they turned in, Larry had his say.

“You remember that bleat that I made about Ollie McKnight four or five weeks ago, Dick?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“I guess I was pretty thin-skinned about that. Mac’s all right. He came to me to-day and squared things like a man. I’m telling you because I beefed to you about what he said; but you’re not to let it go any further.”

The day of the Sheddon-Rockford game was all that could be desired, weather-wise. A light frost during the night――not enough to hurt the field――put a keen tang in the air: but the sun was like the one in Alice in Wonderland――shining with all its might. A “pep” meeting of the student body had been held the night before, and when the game was called there wasn’t a vacant seat on the bleachers.

The Rockford team, big fellows, to a man, showed up in fine form, and it was evident from the kick-off that it was to be a fight for blood. Brock’s men, playing for the first time in the season on their home field, and with all Sheddon present to shout encouragement, did their best; but it wasn’t quite good enough. At the end of the second quarter the score stood 7 to nothing in favor of the visitors, Rockford having pushed the ball over for a touch-down and kicked goal――at which the trainload of rooters who had come over from Rockford were yelling their heads off.

“Our offense is pitiful!” Larry told Dick in the intermission. “Shubrick acts as if he’d been crippled, and he’s the only back that’s any good. Brock ought to take him out.”

As he spoke, one of the subs came running up to them, breathless with excitement.

“Donovan!” he panted, “coach says get on your uniform, quick! He’s going to put you in Shubrick’s place next half!”

For a moment Larry stood as if dazed. But the next instant he was racing for the gymnasium with Dick at his heels.

While Larry fairly jumped from his “civies” into his foot-ball togs, Dick talked excitedly. It was a chance――biggest chance that had ever been given a Sheddon Freshman――Larry could put it through――he _must_ put it through; and things like that.

“I’ll be found trying,” was all Larry said; but there was a “do-or-die” grin to go with the promise as he jerked his belt tight, grabbed up his headgear, and started for the field on a run.

A moment later he was reporting to the coach. The members of the team were stripping their sweaters preparatory to the dash on the field for the second half.

“I’m not going to start you, Donovan,” said the coach, putting an arm across Larry’s shoulders. “You sit on the bench with me and I’ll send you in when you’re needed.”

Sitting quietly beside the coach, Larry looked on while Rockford took the ball and, by superior weight and superb interference, pushed it over for another touch-down just as the third quarter ended. The goal was missed, and with just fifteen short minutes left to play, the score stood Rockford 13, Sheddon nothing.

Suddenly Brock gripped Larry’s arm.

“Now’s the time. You take Shubrick’s place. Remember to report to the referee. Then, after the first play, tell Clark to run 43――with you back――that’s you, just outside tackle on the right; and then to call you back on the other side and run 44――that’s off tackle on the other side. Tell him to keep on running you as long as you can gain. You’re our only chance, boy!――and I believe you’ll pull us out of the hole!”

Larry didn’t speak; he merely grinned and dashed on the field with his fists clenched so tight that his finger-nails were white, and with his teeth set.

“Donovan for Shubrick at right half!” he snapped at the referee. “Shubrick out!” shouted the referee; and a moment later blew his whistle for the resumption of play.

Sheddon had received the kick-off on the thirty-yard line. On the first down, Shubrick had been thrown for a loss. Clark, Sheddon’s quarter, did not wait for the coach’s instructions. He had seen Larry play and knew his power. As soon as Larry was in position, Clark barked his signal: “Formation right! Donovan back! 32――43――59!” The ball came to Larry on a direct pass from the center. Starting toward opponent’s tackle, he swerved suddenly to the right and found his hole just inside of the end. Rockford’s full-back got him, but he had gained five yards.

“Good boy, Larry!” yelled Dugald, the big Sheddon captain, helping him to his feet. “Do it again!”

“Watch me!” Larry grinned, jumping back to his position.

And, sure enough, he did do it again, on the same play, only this time for seven yards and a first down. By this time the Sheddon bleachers were beginning to realize that something was happening. There had been little cause for joy in that section of the stands during the first half. But now business was certainly picking up.

“Who’s the new man?” the cheer leader called to the coach.

“Donovan!” the coach shouted back; and then the cheer leader turned to the stands and held up his hands.

“Everybody get into it!” he yelled. “Fifteen for Donovan!” and the fifteen might have been heard in the next county.

Larry heard them just as he got the ball for the straight third time. The opposing end had crowded in close to stop him, so Larry simply ran around him, taking the ball to Rockford’s ten-yard line, where Rockford’s quarter-back brought him down by a beautiful diving tackle.

Immediately Rockford’s coach sent in several substitutes in an attempt to stem the tide and prevent a score. The Rockford captain was walking up and down, slapping his linemen on the back, and urging them to “get low,” while the Rockford bleachers answered Sheddon’s chant of “Touch-down, Sheddon! Touch-down, Sheddon!” with a prayer to “Hold ’em, Rockford! Hold ’em, Rockford!”

Sheddon’s full-back shot into the line for a scant yard. He tried again, but could add only two more. Two more downs to make seven yards and a touch-down. Sheddon’s rooters stood up. Something was wrong. First came cries from individuals: “Give it to Donovan!” Then the stands roared out, “Give it to Donovan!”

Rockford knew then that it was to be given to Donovan, and quickly set themselves to stop him. This time the signal was for a mass on left tackle. But Larry saw at a glance, as the ball came into his hands, that the Rockford players were bunched just where the play should go ... and in the same glance he saw that there was a hole through right guard. Leaving his interference, he shot through the hole, dodged the full-back, and dived across the goal line.

Dugald kicked goal, while the Sheddon stands rang with the name of Donovan, and the Sheddon players patted him on the back and called him “Good old Larry!” The score was now 13 to 7, and Sheddon could win with another touch-down and goal.

“How much time to play?” Dugald asked, as Sheddon lined up to receive the kick-off――Rockford having chosen to kick.

“Ten minutes!” answered the timekeeper.

“Come on, fellows――we can do it!” Dugald cried; and the team answered him in bellowing unison, Larry’s voice ringing out with a new-found happiness: “Sure we can do it! Let’s go!”

But it was not so easy, this time. Rockford began to watch Larry, and every time he took the ball it seemed as if the whole Rockford team was on top of him. But steadily Sheddon pushed the ball down to Rockford’s fifteen-yard line, only to lose it on a fumble. Rockford kicked out of danger, and Sheddon again started the march to victory. Then the timekeeper announced four minutes to play――and the goal was sixty yards away!

Dugald came out of the line and spoke low to Larry.

“Larry, you’re the only one who can gain. Can you stand to take it every time?”

“Give it to me!” Larry answered, gritting his teeth.

Eight straight times the ball came to him, and eight straight times he carried it toward Rockford’s goal. He followed no signals――merely took the ball and bucked, dodged, fought his way forward. Rockford knew he was coming, but they came to know that they could not stop him. The bleachers were now giving forth a continuous roar; and when, on the eighth try, Larry carried the ball over for Sheddon’s second touch-down, he knew, as every man on the field knew, that he had won for Sheddon――for Dugald made the victory an assured fact by kicking goal, thus making the final score 14–13.

It was from no lack of college spirit that Larry Donovan did not turn out that night to join in the song-singing, cheer-bellowing “snake dance” wherewith Sheddon celebrated its victory. A bruised ankle――that he didn’t know was lamed until the game was over――kept him in his room, and it was here that Dick found him when the long, noisy parade wriggled its way back to the campus after having shouted itself hoarse all over town.

“How’s the old foot-knuckle by now?――hurt much?” inquired the celebrator, peeling off the white night-shirt which was the regalia for the parade.

“Nothing to weep about,” said Larry. “It’ll be all right in a day or so. Parade over?”

“Fellows were just coming across the campus when I skipped out. Going to disband at the gym., I guess,” he added, stepping to the window to look out. Then: “No, by jinks! They’re coming this way: Larry, you old snipe, they’re coming for you!”

Pallid panic leaped into the eyes of the temporarily crippled substitute half-back.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, Dick――can’t you stop ’em?” he gasped.

But it was too late to stop them. Already the white-robed mob was filling the street in front of Mrs. Grant’s. “Donovan! Donovan!” it yelled; and Larry, with Dick to help him, had to hobble to the window, which Dick threw open.

They didn’t demand a speech; all they wanted was to see him. When he waved awkwardly to the surging mass, a roar broke forth. Then, with the cheer leader to time it, they gave him the Sheddon series.

When the crowd broke up, Dick led the cripple back to his chair, and for quite some little time Larry sat with his head in his hands, staring down at an open book which might have been printed in Sanskrit for all that the words in it meant to him. Dick waited as long as he thought he ought to. Then he said: “How about that ‘workingman’ class line now, Larry?”

Larry looked up, and the good gray eyes were suspiciously bright.

“They’ve broken it down for me, individually, Dick; but it’s here, just the same――you know it is. I had a bit of good luck this afternoon, and for that they’ve taken me in. But there are lots of others who won’t be taken in; little Purdick, and Jungman, and dozens that I could name.”

“Well?” said Dick, as one who would say, “What are you going to do about it?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m going to do, Dick,” Larry shot back, much as if he had read Dick’s unspoken question; “I’m going to make it my job to break the combination――or as much of it as can be broken from my side of the fence. Old Sheddon ought to be one and indivisible, all through the year, just as it is on the day of a foot-ball victory. I’m going to do what one fellow can to make it so.”

Dickie Maxwell started to gasp, but caught himself in good time. “That’s the right old stuff!” he chanted heartily. “Go to it, old scout, and when the pinches come, I’ll be there to help.”

Yet, later, it was Larry who was to do the helping――but that does not belong to the story of the Offish Worm.

III

THE LAME DOGS

Old Sheddon, calling itself pretty strictly an engineering school, is peculiar in one respect: it has no dormitories on its campus. Its two thousand (more or less) undergraduates live in clubs, fraternity houses, and with the neighbors. Practically everybody in the college town takes roomers and boarders, and among these private houses the “Man-o’-War” was popular for two reasons: Mrs. Grant was a most motherly home body; and her pies were, as Dickie Maxwell put it, “simply out of sight.”

Dick and Larry had the largest of the upstairs rooms, with two windows on the side toward the street and the campus. While the college year was still in its infancy, it began to be remarked that these windows were seldom dark in the evening. Which meant that at least one of the room’s occupants knew what he wanted and was going stubbornly after it.

“Great Peter!” Dick complained, one evening after the Thanksgiving game had closed the foot-ball season, “aren’t you ever going to take any time off at all, Larry? See here; I’ve got an ‘invite’ to a blowout at the Omeg house to-night, and it includes you. Cut out the studious stuff for a change and surprise yourself by coming along to mix and mingle for an hour or so.”

“Nix on the social stuff,” grumbled the big, red-headed fellow at the study table; “I’ve got two English themes to write.”

“Which means that you don’t want to go,” Dick charged discontentedly.

“All right; you can put it that way, if you like. You know what I think about the frats.”

“I know you’re a howling crank about ’em. You haven’t a single argument against ’em that’ll hold water.”

“Sure I have. But I haven’t time to trot them out for you now. Got these themes to chew on, and after that――――”

“Yes; and after that, your lame dogs will begin to string in. You’ve got the wrong slant on the cripples, Larry; the faculty has the right one. If a fellow can’t keep up with the parade, out he goes. And he ought to go.”

“I can’t see it that way――not for the kind of fellows who have taken to dropping in here. They want to stay in college――want to make good. And most of ’em only need a little boosting and jacking up.”

“Well,” said Dick, hustling into his good clothes, “I’m mighty glad I don’t have to look at it through your spectacles. I don’t want to be a pack-mule before my time.”

When he was left alone, Larry dug for the themes. English was his “black beast,” as a Frenchman would put it, and he had to work like a Turk for it――that is, if Turks ever do work. In his time――which was only yesterday――managers of the nation’s great industries were beginning to say that the technical colleges were paying too little attention to English; that they were turning out engineers who couldn’t write an ordinary, every-day business letter. Hence the technicals, Old Sheddon among them, were stressing the English course.

Larry’s home surroundings hadn’t been particularly conducive to the growth of literary English. In the Donovan home “ain’t” and “he don’t” and “might of” had their places at the fireside, along with split infinitives, plural verbs in the wrong places, “let him and I,” telephone answers like “this is him,” and a lot of other expressions that the grammar books call “colloquialisms.” So he had to labor pretty heavily in “English I.”

But in Mathematics it was exactly the other way around. Here the big, athletic Freshman soon became known as a “shark,” and a good-natured “shark” is an institution not to be undervalued in any college. Before the foot-ball season closed, Larry was acquiring a small following of “lame dogs”; fellows who had to be helped over the stile, if they were going to get over at all; hence, Dickie Maxwell’s wail about pack-mules and such.

Down underneath the good-nature which prompted these helpings, Larry had a sort of ill-defined motive which was more or less to his credit. As a son of a workingman he had entered college with the feeling that he was going to be looked down upon, and certain fellows with more money than sense had either thoughtlessly or maliciously helped the feeling to grow. But in the better part of him, Larry was too square and man-sized to become that bitterest of all things, the college grouch, so he had begun to open out a bit on the side of the helpings, this though he was still hanging on to the idea that between the son of an ex-locomotive engineer and, let us say, a member of the richest Greek-Letter fraternity, there was a gulf fixed, great and impassable.

Dick had been gone a full hour, and the second of the English themes was well on its way to completion when the door opened and little Purdick slid in. At first sight, anybody would have said that Charles Purdick had certainly missed the mark by a broad mile in choosing an engineering course. Undersized, with a thin, eager face and pale-blue, tired eyes, he looked more like a candidate for a sanitarium than anything else.

“Hello, old scout!” said Larry in a cheerful growl. “Thought maybe you’d be showing up. Drag out that easy-chair and flop. Had a tough day?”

The undersized one tried to laugh his weariness off.

“If you ever have to work any part of your way through, don’t you take a restaurant for it,” he advised; adding, “I don’t mind waiting on table and having to refuse the tips――I’m sort o’ case-hardened to that now. But the dish-washing sure does get next to me.”

“I’ll bet,” said Larry. “At home I was lucky; have a sister two years younger than I am. But that’s all that saved me. Stuck on the trig, again?”

“I’m always stuck on the trig. If I didn’t love machinery so well, I’d think I’d made the mistake of my life in coming to Sheddon. Yet the High School Math. didn’t bother me so much.”

“Pull up your chair and let’s have a crack at it,” said Larry. “I looked it over just after supper, and it isn’t so awfully rocky, this time.”

With the trigonometry lesson but fairly begun, another of the lame ones dropped in; then a third and fourth. Larry didn’t “baby” the mental mendicants――not any; on the contrary, with the exception of little Purdick, he was gruffly sarcastic with them, calling them cripples, and demanding to know how long it was going to be before they’d throw the crutches away. It was the wise thing to do, but Larry didn’t do it because he was wise; it was chiefly impatience with a bunch of fellows the majority of whom hadn’t made the most of their preparatory advantages while they had them.

Purdick, the first to come, was the last to go. After the others had dropped out one by one, he told Larry why he was lingering.

“You’ve been rattling good to me, Donovan, and there’s something I ought to tell you,” was the way he began the thing that had to be said.

“All right; spill it,” said Larry.

“This fellow Underhill, in your section; you had a racket with him after the foot-ball game with Rockford Poly, didn’t you?”

“Not much of a racket. He was standing, with a bunch of his own kind, on the gym. steps as I came from the showers, and was busy black-listing the coach for having put me in: said it was a disgrace to Sheddon to use a ‘mucker’ on the ’Varsity, and then chucked in some things about my home folks that I don’t take from anybody.”

“Did you hit him?”

“No; I tried it, but the others got between. Then I guess I did a fool thing. Underhill’s father is the head of a firm of railroad contractors. A couple of years back this firm had a job on our home railroad, and it did so much crooked work that the contract had to be cancelled. Dick told me about this one day when Underhill had gone out of his way to cold-shoulder me.”

“And you slammed that in Undy’s face?”

Larry nodded. “I was hot, and didn’t have any better sense.”

Little Purdick wriggled uneasily in his chair.